News

Microsoft Open Sourcing MSDN - Good News?   Wednesday 04 May

Microsoft has announced a preview release of docs.microsoft.com, a new documentation service to replace MSDN and TechNet.

IBM Might Give Some Access To Its Five-Qubit Quantum Computer   Wednesday 04 May

Our headline is reasonably accurate - what do you expect in a single sentence - but others are less so. IBM has provided access to some quantum computing hardware and this is interesting, but it isn't a revolution. 

Free Code Camp - Not Just A Bootcamp   Wednesday 04 May

Free Code Camp is an open source community that helps you learn how to code by working though self-paced coding challenges and building projects. It offers verified certificates, is completely free and you can help non-profits as you learn. It is also highly popular on GitHub.

Will Windows 10 Achieve Its Billion Users?   Tuesday 03 May

The end of January statistics for desktop operating system market share from Net Applications show that uptake of Windows 10 is continuing, but at a slower rate.

ACM 2015 Technical Awards   Tuesday 03 May

The ACM has announced the latest recipients of its four major technical awards, chosen for their contributions in the fields of systems software, cryptography, artificial intelligence, and network coding systems. 

Doubt Over Craig Wright's Claim To Be Bitcoin Inventor   Monday 02 May

In a blog post Craig Wright claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto and apparently the evidence is so overwhelming that news agencies are running headlines like "Inventor of Bitcoin identified". Not so fast.

Pharo MOOC on FUN   Monday 02 May

Today sees the start of a MOOC about Pharo, the object-oriented language based on Smalltalk. The video lectures are in French with English subtitles and the course pdfs are in English only. Over 2200 students have enrolled so far.

Computational Photography Shows Hi-Res Mars   Sunday 01 May

Computational photographic is amazing, but sometimes you have to wonder if it is actually useful and not just amusing. Proving that it is, researchers have found a way to extract high-resolution images from multiple low-resolution images of the Martian surface. These are good enough almost to see the lost Beagle 2 lander clearly.

Google Doodle for Claude Shannon's 100th Anniversary.   Saturday 30 April

Claude Shannon was born on April 30th 1916 and is credited with being the Father of Information Theory, or more colloquially the Father of the Bit, which explains today's Google Doodle.

OpenAI Gym Gives Reinforcement Learning A Work Out   Friday 29 April

When OpenAI, an open source AI initiative backed by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, was announced earlier in the year, I doubt anyone expected anything to be produced so quickly and certainly not something connected with reinforcement learning. OpenAI Gym is what it sounds like - an exercise facility for reinforcement learning. 

Node.js v6 Released   Friday 29 April

Node.js version 6 provides major performance improvements, increased reliability and better security. It also features improved ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) support - 93% of ES6 features are now supported compared to 56% for Node.js v5.

Xamarin SDK Open Sourced   Thursday 28 April

The big news at Xamarin's Evolve developer conference is that its SDK is now open source and under the care of the .NET Foundation. Bigger news would have been a clearer view of where it's all going - but that assumes that Microsoft has worked it out. 

Linux Data Science Virtual Machine   Thursday 28 April

A virtual machine image packed with data science tools has been released by Microsoft.

Mozilla Looking For a New Home For Thunderbird   Thursday 28 April

The writing has been on the wall for Mozilla Thunderbird for quite some time. Now Mozilla is actively engaged in the process of getting rid of it. Could Thunderbird spread its wings and have a new lease of life?

The Core

Exploring Edison - Beyond mraa   Sunday 10 April

There is a Linux-based approach to working with GPIO lines and serial buses that is worth knowing about because it provides an alternative to using the mraa library. Sometimes you need this because you are working in a language for which mraa isn't available. It also lets you access features that mraa doesn't make available. 

Android Adventures - Getting Started With Android Studio 2   Thursday 28 April

Google's Android Studio, recently released at Version 2, makes creating native Android apps very easy. You can get started in a few minutes and by the end of this chapter have your first working Android application.